Zero Days, page 16
‘Don’t lose it. And Drayton, try not to talk to him about algorithms.’
‘Algorithms?’
‘Yes, mathematical recipes. Avoid them. Now go do your stuff.’
She watched the American walk down the street with its jostling mass of semi-clad bodies.
Dobberman’s bar wasn’t hard to find, a big prancing neon horse above the entrance, and as soon as Drayton paused outside, a girl grabbed him by the hand, leading him beyond the curtain.
It was busy, with three tiers of seating on either side of a central stage, a bar at the far end. Stools right beside the stage too, for the full-on voyeurs to get a better view. Though right now that didn’t look to Drayton like a smart place to be, since girls dressed in nothing but cowboy hats and boots were climbing and swinging around poles before crashing their boots to the ground. All to the beat of heavy metal music. AC/DC, ‘Highway to Hell’.
He sat close to where the mamasan called Meow was conducting the whole thing, like an orchestra, mic in hand. The noise she made was more Rottweiler than cat. Barking orders at the girls. Directing the next shift to the stage; ordering others to go schmooze the customers. She had a whiteboard behind her, a record of which girls had left with customers to the short-time place around the corner and how long they’d been away.
Drayton ordered a beer.
Then he introduced himself to Meow, who came and sat beside him.
The first thing she said was that the girls were lazy. That this was easy money for them, and that the customers were stupid. Really stupid. She never looked directly at Drayton, always watching the bar. Eagle-eyed. Ready to pounce.
She was middle aged and struck Drayton as a veteran of the bar business, who’d likely come up through its ranks. Hard-nosed, yes, but protective of the girls. Her girls, as she called them. She was quick to step in if her leering, groping customers overstepped the line. Though it was never clear where that line was, and it tended to move depending on how much money they were spending.
She detested Dobberman, who hadn’t just crossed the line, but had taken one great leap in his abuse of the girls. Calling him ding-dong, ai wen, and a yet pet. Drayton didn’t have a clue what that meant, but she kept repeating the words, spitting them out with such anger that whatever it was, it wasn’t good. Then she said Dobberman was a creep. Mr Creep. Which she said she’d learned from her friend Vika, which she pronounced more as a Veeeka.
She said she liked Veeeka. That the girl spoke good Thai and had big balls.
Drayton said he couldn’t argue with that.
Meow had eagerly agreed to Vika’s plan. Anything to punish Mr Creep. But she warned Drayton that it mustn’t hurt the girls. He said he was sure it wouldn’t and handed her the small piece of folded tinfoil, which she placed in a top pocket of her shirt.
‘The creep’s friend. The cop. He’s leaving,’ she said, pointing across the bar, where the tall Thai from the surveillance video was heading towards the door.
‘This way please,’ she said to Drayton. ‘Let’s find you a seat with a better view.’
She led him around the stage, and gave him the place vacated by the cop, right beside Dobberman.
The stage was now filled with girls dressed as angels with big wings on their backs, prancing around to a song called ‘Zombie’, and quickly stripping off the angel gear as the song droned on, until they were naked, apart from stockings, which were stuffed with money by the rubbernecked voyeurs with the ringside seats.
Close-up, Dobberman was a mess. Vika had said he was mid-twenties, but he looked older. He had a fat, pale, unshaven face. Bloated-looking. A double chin and no neck. Drayton thinking that house arrest can’t be all that bad, and whatever conditions they were keeping him in, he wasn’t short of food.
He was unshaven, messy unshaven, not the geeky designer stubble look. His hair, short, curly and greasy, looked like it hadn’t been washed or combed in a while. He was wearing a pair of square-rimmed glasses that sat awkwardly on his nose, as if they’d been sat on and bent out of shape. He wore a stained grey T-shirt and blue jeans. There was a topless girl sitting to his left, whom he mostly ignored, working his phone, on which he seemed to be playing a game. Looking occasionally at the stage. Guzzling beer like it was water.
The lights went down and next up on stage was a paint show. A man with a big brush splashing fluorescent paint on naked bodies, which gave Drayton his cue.
‘Man, gives a whole new meaning to modern art. Imagine hanging one of those on your wall.’
Dobberman looked up from his phone. ‘Yeah. But this guy’s not so good. They had a better one before.’
‘You’re from the UK?’ said Drayton, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Chuck. Good to meet you.’
Dobberman shook the outstretched hand and said his name was Matt and that he was from London. Drayton said he was a New Yorker and asked what brought Matt to Bangkok.
‘Oh, consultancy shit. And you?’
‘Holiday,’ said Drayton.
‘What do you do back in the States?’
Drayton said he taught Computer Science, but then immediately regretted it, since Dobberman put his phone away and turned more fully towards Drayton. Intense, but looking beyond Drayton, never looking at him directly in the eye.
‘Do you like recipes, Chuck?’
‘Recipes? Food, you mean?’
‘Maths. Mathematical recipes. Algorithms. I love algorithms.’ He spoke with a posh English accent, which surprised Drayton, expecting something coarser. Vika had warned him, but it still seemed a pretty weird place to have a conversation about algorithms. A dozen more girls, this time dressed as maids, getting their kit off on stage, and the guy talking maths.
‘I don’t mean the algorithms that Amazon or Netflix use to give you recommendations. Or Facebook to give you updates based on your behaviour. I mean algorithms that can make sense of everything. Everything, Chuck.’
The maids had now got rid of everything they were wearing, except the stockings for the cash, and were sliding up and down and around the poles. Guns N’ Roses pounding out this time. ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’. They started spanking each other with their maids dusters, lengths of floppy rubber tubing with feathers on top. Giving some customers punishment too. One of the naked maids threw a duster, which landed just in front of Dobberman, almost taking out his drink. But he hardly noticed. He was still talking maths.
‘Do you believe in the perfect algorithm? I mean the ultimate algorithm, an algorithm that can make sense of everything, Chuck?’
He didn’t wait for Drayton to answer. He was getting up to speed, talking real fast. Gabbling almost. In quick-fire bursts. Getting excited.
‘The way I look at it, algorithms are like your best friend. Your child. Or maybe your pet. That’s how we should see them. You need to nurture them. Feed them. Give them nutrition and help them mature and grow. And you know what they feed on, Chuck? Data. The bigger and the better the data, the better they grow and learn.’
‘With computers, I’ve always thought, garbage in, garbage out,’ Drayton said. ‘And as for big data. Big garbage in. Big garbage out. They can amplify mistakes and prejudices. It can be dangerous to put too much faith in them.’
But Dobberman wasn’t listening. He paused to knock back his beer, ordering another, a hand on the breast of the girl beside him, twiddling her nipple like it was a knob on an old radio, searching for a channel.
‘It’s beautiful,’ he said.
But he wasn’t talking about the girl.
‘Once it’s fully trained, you have the perfect algorithm. The ultimate algorithm at your service. A master recipe that can solve anything and everything. Make anything,’ he said, still trying to tune the radio.
‘Or possibly break everything. All on its own,’ said Drayton.
Dobberman laughed. Not so much at the answer, but at Drayton, who’d ducked and was taking cover behind the chair in front of him. The girls now using little blow pipes to shoot arrows at balloons hanging around the bar.
Except they weren’t using their mouths.
Drayton said he wasn’t sure what he’d tell his insurance company if one caught him in the eye.
By the time he resurfaced, Dobberman was still crunching numbers, this time trying to decide between girl number thirteen and twenty-seven. Lek or Noi. All the bar girls wore numbers, usually on boots or stockings. To make life easier for the customers. Though it still seemed to be posing a mathematical challenge to Mr Creep. Drayton thinking that maybe there should be an algorithm for it.
Dobberman decided on Lek. ‘I need to slip out for a while. Get laid. You should take Noi here. She’s pretty attentive.’
‘Thanks for the tip. I’ll do that,’ Drayton said, ordering two more beers as the girls went to get changed. Sling on a few clothes for the walk around the corner. Meow the mamasan brought the beers over, looking at Drayton and tapping on the beer that was for Dobberman. So there would be no mistake.
It was a five minute walk to the short-time hotel, where basic rooms were rented for up to three hours, and where Drayton and Noi were given a room just along the corridor from that of Dobberman and Lek.
Noi put on the television while they waited. Some Thai soap with lots of shouting. Drayton pacing the room.
Noi got bored with the soap, and said she could take good care of Drayton while they waited. He said he’d pass, not that it wasn’t tempting, but because he felt the ghost of Vika in the room, as if her face might appear at any moment, peering in the window. Or out of the screen of his cell phone.
Then Noi started to talk about sex with Mr Creep, that yet pet. She made his approach to sex sound like coding. Cold, calculating and impersonal. And she showed Drayton the bruises on her arm where he had grabbed her in a drunken rage, blaming the girls when he couldn’t perform.
‘He likes to do videos. Weird stuff,’ Noi said, wrinkling her nose in disgust.
After forty-five minutes, Drayton was getting worried.
Maybe Vika had got the dose wrong. She’d insisted on obtaining the sedative herself, not trusting the pills that could be sourced by Meow or the girls, which were sledgehammer-strong, knocking you out for hours or even days. She wanted something more finely calibrated, so Dobberman could be up and around fairly quickly and without suspicion.
Maybe it wasn’t working at all.
Then Noi’s phone buzzed.
‘He’s asleep,’ she said.
They walked down the corridor to Dobberman’s room, where Lek let them in, a towel wrapped around her. Dobberman was asleep on the bed, on his back and naked. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
Drayton picked up Dobberman’s smartphone from a side table, sitting on the bed beside him, lifting his hand and trying each of his fingers on the phone’s fingerprint ID sensor. The index finger on his right hand brought the phone’s home screen to life.
Then Dobberman grunted and coughed. Drayton backed away towards the bathroom door. Lek yelped in shock. Dobberman seemed to be trying to pull himself up. Coughing again. But then slumped back into the flaccid pillow.
‘Quick. Quick,’ said Lek.
Drayton opened the browser on Dobberman’s phone and entered the address of a website created by Vika. From that website he downloaded an app. He then opened and updated the app, activating the spyware inside, which would give them remote control of the phone.
Then Drayton hid the app. As they’d expected, Dobberman’s phone was clogged with apps, several screens full of them, so many that he probably wouldn’t notice the new one. But to be sure, Dayton created a folder for the spyware app and then scrolled through to the last of the screens and buried that folder inside another that had been marked as ‘Miscellaneous’. He placed the smartphone back on the side table.
He picked up a small wallet from the table. There was not much in it. Just a couple of hundred dollars in local currency, and a debit card. The card wasn’t one he recognised. It was plain grey with the logo PEARL DELTA CARD across the top. Below was the word PREPAID in small letters. It didn’t carry Dobberman’s name. Just a number.
Drayton put it back in the wallet, and put the wallet back on the table, Noi pulling his arm now.
‘Mister. Please. We go now.’
The creep groaned and then farted.
As they left the room, he began to murmur. Drayton couldn’t make out for sure what he was mumbling about, but it sounded a lot like algorithms.
*****
Vika was waiting in a pub at the end of the go-go bar road. She was sitting in a quiet corner, back to the wall, and with her laptop open in front of her. So that nobody else could see the screen. It was connected to the pub’s Wi-Fi.
‘What’s a ding-dong, an ai wen and a yet pet?’ was the first thing Drayton asked when he joined her from the short-time hotel. ‘The mamasan. The girls. That’s what they called Dobberman.’
‘Well, roughly speaking, that would be a crazy bastard duck-fucker,’ Vika said. ‘And they’re right.’
‘Where’d you learn that stuff? Can’t imagine it’s in your average language book. Lesson one. How to win friends and influence people in Bangkok. “Good morning Mr Duck-Fucker.” I don’t think so. Or was it something you picked up around the boxing rings?’
‘I’ve spent a lot of time here, on and off,’ she said. ‘The Thais have a lot of colourful language for creeps. And a lot of creeps visit Thailand. Mostly middle-aged western men like you Drayton. Hanging out in places like that.’
‘Well thanks,’ said Drayton, ordering a beer. ‘I was working, you’ll recall. And since you asked, the job’s done.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I can see.’
Drayton sat beside Vika, both of them looking at the screen of her laptop, which displayed a control console for the spyware. She had a map open, a little blue circle in the middle of it, which began moving down one of the roads.
‘He’s leaving the hotel,’ she said.
The little blob stopped outside the go-go bar, as if it was thinking of going in there again, or maybe dropping the girl back. Then it was on the move again, into a bigger street, where it made another stop.
‘McDonald’s,’ Vika said. ‘He’ll be ordering a Big Mac meal. Always does at this time.’
‘You sure?’
‘Let’s check.’
She activated the phone’s cameras, back and then front, and its microphone, but the picture was black, the sound muffled, most likely because it was in his pocket. Then the creep pulled it out, looking at something on the screen. His fat face filled a video window on Vika’s console, stuffing the last of the Big Mac into his mouth. Vika handed Drayton an ear bud, so he could hear the action, the background buzz of the place, but mostly Dobberman chomping away then sucking the straw from a big Coke.
‘Fuck, that’s not nice,’ Drayton said.
Then Dobberman put his phone back in his pocket, the picture on Vika’s screen going to black.
Vika seemed proud of her bug. ‘It can do pretty much everything, just as long as the phone’s powered up and online. It can take pictures and video with his camera, listen to his conversations, collect all location data, call history, emails, messages, contacts. The lot.’ There was only one drawback. They’d need to wait until Dobberman was on Wi-Fi back at his house before they could download all his existing data.
As the blue blob left McDonalds, it began to move faster, like he was running. Which seemed weird, Vika looking at Drayton, puzzled by the blob’s sudden urgency.
Then there was a huge crash of thunder, echoing around the nearby office towers. Then intense, pounding rain that seemed to come from nowhere. The blob was trying to beat the downpour, and Drayton watched it move, willing it on, afraid their evening’s work was about to be washed away along with Dobberman’s smartphone.
The blob made it back to his house. But Drayton and Vika were stuck, watching the sound and light show from the bar.
Drayton asked about the deal with the girls. Vika said it was done. All sorted. That she’d paid them, and paid them well.
The rain stopped almost as abruptly as it had started, and they left onto flooded streets. It would have been easier to wait for the water to recede, as it usually did, pretty quickly. But they needed to get back, which meant wading through flood water that in places was almost knee-deep.
Vika stopped at a food stall, water lapping halfway up its wheels, an umbrella sheltering trays of little snacks. Drayton said they looked like insects, and Vika said that was because they were. That bugs, the crawly ones, were a delicacy in the north-east of Thailand. Full of protein. She bought what looked like fat maggots, together with a handful of fried grasshoppers. She said she’d eaten scorpions once. And dung beetles. But they gave her a bad stomach.
‘Funny that,’ said Drayton. ‘Who’d have thought?’
‘You want one?’
Drayton said he’d pass. ‘I just sleep with insects. Cockroaches, you’ll recall.’
‘Watch where you put your feet. The sidewalks are riddled with holes, and legend is that each year during the rainy season, scores of people simply disappear into the subterranean depths of the city.’
‘Well, great,’ said Drayton. ‘Maybe that’s what’s happened to Dobberman, and as we speak, the duck-fucker is being swept into some distant sewer.’
Vika said she kinda liked that idea. That it was where he belonged. But only after he’d led them to Dmitry.
Though it had stopped raining, the sky was still flickering with lightening. Another malfunctioning light bulb. The air filled with the sound of wailing dogs and croaking frogs, their discordant duet peaking with each distant rumble of thunder.
Vika opened her laptop as soon as they got to their room. The blue blob was still on the map, stationary in his house. She couldn’t get any other response from Dobberman’s phone. She rebooted her laptop, but still nothing.
Drayton flopped onto the bed closest to the window. ‘Maybe it was damaged by the water. Caught in the downpour. Or he’s found the bug.’
‘The battery could be drained. Could be as simple as that. The bug’s pretty hungry on power. Or else he’s switched it off,’ Vika said, trying to sound upbeat, but looking worried, the bug no longer talking to her. She set an alarm on the console for when the phone came back online. If it came back. That’s all they could do for now. Wait and watch.
